The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Some existing products offer a comprehensive architecture for electronic document creation, collaboration, and process management. In an architecture that distinguishes between an electronic form template and electronic form data, the template and content associated with the electronic form may be stored separately and then merged to produce a form object when an electronic form processing application (e.g., Adobe® Acrobat®) receives a request to open an electronic form. The application next generates a version of the requested electronic form, utilizing the form object, in a static presentation format, such as, for example, in Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF). The application then renders the generated version of the requested electronic form to the screen.
Each time a user modifies the form data, e.g., using interactive elements of the electronic form, the application stores the modified form data, generates a modified version of the entire form in a static presentation format, and then renders the visible portion of the generated modified version to the screen.